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Goal: Smoke-free Dogwood Park

A crowd gathers in Dogwood Park for the lighting of the city's Christmas tree. Cookeville City Council is moving to have the park declared a smoke-free zone.

Ty Kernea | Herald-Citizen

Posted
Friday, December 16, 2016 12:10 am

By LINDSAY McREYNOLDS

The Cookeville City Council is asking the state legislature to allow the city to declare Dogwood Park a smoke-free facility through a resolution approved Thursday night.

Councilman Chuck Womack brought the resolution before the council last month.

He told other members that he had been contacted by representatives from the governor's Healthier Communities initiative and the American Cancer Society Action Network who want a change that allows municipalities — rather than the state — to set appropriate rules for smoking in parks, at amphitheaters and in other outdoor areas.

“I think it’s a reasonable first step,” Womack said. “With the playground and the amphitheater, it’s probably our most popular park.”

Womack said two other cities already have similar private acts — one to declare the Ascend Amphitheater in Nashville and another to declare a swimming pool in Kingston as smoke-free.

The resolution states that the National Cancer Institute determined in 1999 that secondhand smoke is responsible for the early deaths of 53,000 Americans annually.

Councilman Dwight Henry recalled that, as a child, he lost his father, who smoked and had emphysema, at the age of 50.

“My dad started smoking at 8 to 10 years old,” Henry said.

Councilman Larry Epps, a nurse anesthetist, said he cares for people who have smoking-related illnesses and hopes that Cookeville can be a pioneer in passing this resolution, similar to the way the city was the first in the state to pass an anti-meth ordinance back in 2003.

Mayor Ricky Shelton, who was a councilman at that time, sponsored the ordinance that limited the sale of over-the-counter packages having a sole active ingredient of ephedrine or pseudoephedrine to no more than 3 grams except for in cases of prescriptions.

Thursday night, Shelton brought up the question of whether or not the resolution would include vaping.

It was the last meeting of the year for the council, which takes action on various items twice each month.

Other items approved Thursday night:

• The sale of property and equipment for $101 at 1976 Chocolate Drive to Russell Stover Chocolates, LLC per a 1977 lease.

• A bid for $17,890 from Vinnie T’s Catering to provide meals for four nights of the city’s Father-Daughter Date Night in February and $2,450 for the chocolate fountain.

• A $1.09 million bid from J&H Construction for the Tennessee Tech Area Water and Sewer Rehab project.

The council also set public hearings for two rezoning requests and the closure of undeveloped alleys.

The council will consider rezoning 570 State Street from single-family residential to multi-family residential on Jan. 19 and property off Locust Grove Road from industrial commercial mixed-use to single-family residential.

An ordinance to close undeveloped alleys off South Oak Avenue and Depot Street and declare them as surplus will also be considered Jan. 19.